PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nebula, launched today by a team of engineers and entrepreneurs from
industry tech giants and led by former NASA CTO Chris C. Kemp, announced
plans for a turnkey OpenStack hardware appliance that will shift the
fundamental economics of computing by allowing businesses to easily,
securely and inexpensively deploy large private cloud computing
infrastructures from thousands of inexpensive computers with minimal
effort.

“Until today, this computing power has only been accessible to
organizations like NASA and a small number of elite Silicon Valley
companies,” said Kemp, CEO of Nebula. “We intend to bring it to the rest
of the world.”

“Nebula will disrupt and democratize cloud computing,” said John Doerr,
partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “As original creators of
OpenStack, this team has the unique expertise to deliver simplicity,
scale, speed and low cost for enterprise cloud computing.”

From social network data feeds and output from next-generation gene
sequencers to sensors spreading like wildfire throughout manufacturing
supply chains, the amount of data being generated and processed by
companies is growing at rates far exceeding processing and storage
capacities. Analyzing these massive data sets for insights has ushered
in a host of new innovations in the field of big data analytics.

Cloud computing is widely regarded as the infrastructure solution for
big data analytics and a range of other computing needs. But the
barriers to adoption have been high. Companies today choose between
accepting the high costs and risks associated with public cloud
computing services, buying yesterday’s most expensive technology and
integrating it at their own expense, or attempting to hire an elite team
of technologists to cobble together dozens of open source technologies
and commodity hardware into a proprietary solution. Nebula levels the
playing field by delivering a fully supported large-scale computing
platform with a turnkey device that automatically configures a private
cloud in minutes.

Nebula incorporates and builds on OpenStack, the open source,
standards-based cloud platform being used at NASA and other large cloud
service providers.

“Nebula embracing OpenStack today is similar to Sun embracing Berkeley
UNIX in the 1980s,” said Andy Bechtolsheim. “Proprietary systems did not
have a chance against open platforms. I see Nebula as the company that
will bring OpenStack to the private enterprise cloud.”

In addition to supporting standard commodity servers from today’s
enterprise vendors, Nebula will support Facebook’s Open Compute
platform, enabling enterprises to deploy highly efficient and
inexpensive servers with a simplicity that will dramatically lower the
adoption barrier to private cloud computing.

Nebula is rapidly expanding its operations and building its team, which
includes co-founders Steve O’Hara and Devin Carlen, OpenStack pioneers,
and top engineers and executives formerly with Google, NASA, Amazon,
Disney, Dell, Anso Labs, Rackspace and Microsoft. Product trials with
leading energy, finance, biotech and media companies are expected to
begin in Q4 2011. To learn more about Nebula’s product, career and pilot
opportunities, please visit www.nebula.com.

About Nebula

Nebula is dedicated to enabling all businesses to easily, securely and
inexpensively deploy large private cloud computing infrastructures.
Nebula has developed a hardware appliance that allows any business to
easily build a massive private computing cloud from hundreds or
thousands of inexpensive computers. The company was founded in April
2011 by Chris C. Kemp, Steve O’Hara and Devin Carlen, and is named after
a project that Kemp started at NASA Ames Research Center. Nebula’s
mission is to ignite a new era of global innovation by laying the
foundation of the coming “industrial revolution of big data.” Based in
Palo Alto, Calif., Nebula is privately held and venture-funded by
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners. Other
investors include Google’s first investors, Andy Bechtolsheim, David
Cheriton and Ram Shriram. For more information, visit Nebula at www.nebula.com.